Top 100 Quotes About Novelists
#1. I think novelists, when they write their books, end up having occasionally serving a purpose and playing roles that they never really fully either intended or even understood.
Khaled Hosseini
#2. How can we expect novelists to be moral, when their trade forces them to treat every end they meet as no more than an imperfect means to a novel?
Randall Jarrell
#3. For purposes of marketing, writers are designated as poets, novelists, or something else. But writing is about matchmaking, an attempt to marry sensations with apt words.
Teju Cole
#4. You have seven writers in your basement?"
Donald nods, signing, "They like it here. There's a poet, a couple of novelists, an opera librettist, an essay writer ... They don't usually make much trouble.
Susan Wiggs
#5. America may have great poets and novelists, but she never will have more than one necromancer.
Rebecca Harding Davis
#6. Let's hope the institution of marriage survives its detractors, for without it there would be no more adultery and without adultery two thirds of our novelists would stand in line for unemployment checks.
Peter S. Prescott
#7. If you ask a twenty-one-year-old poet whose poetry he likes, he might say, unblushing, "Nobody's," In his youth, he has not yet understood that poets like poetry, and novelists like novels; he himself likes only the role, the thought of himself in a hat.
Annie Dillard
#8. The fundamental difficulty that most novelists face when they are trying to adapt their own book into a screenplay is realizing that a screenplay is a completely different way of storytelling, and it has limitations.
Barry Eisler
#9. Novelists and poets are the landscape artists and portrait painters; academic writers are the people with big paint sprayers who repaint your basement.
Paul J. Silvia
#10. I'm a very good storyteller; I have a lot of compassion for people. That's very useful for a novelist. A lot of novelists are snots. They're just mean people. I'm not a terribly skilled stylist, nor do I want to be. I want a lot of people to read one of my stories and go, 'That was pretty cool.'
James Patterson
#11. she thought that the romance novelists were wrong and it was men, not women, who were the true romantics.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#12. In a certain way, novelists become unacknowledged historians, because we talk about small, tiny, little anonymous moments that won't necessarily make it into the history books.
Colum McCann
#13. And in that same way, law school breaks a mind down. Novelists, poets, and artists don't often do well in law school, but neither, necessarily, do mathematicians, logicians and scientists. The first group fails because their logic is their own; the second fails because logic is all they own.
Hanya Yanagihara
#14. Ruth was a novelist, and novelists, Oliver asserted, should have cats and books.
Ruth Ozeki
#15. Christian literature comes from Christian novelists and dramatists - not from the bench of bishops getting together and trying to write plays and novels in their spare time.
C.S. Lewis
#16. I am looking for the novelists whose writing is an extension of their intellect rather than an extension of their neurosis.
Tom Robbins
#18. Real novelists, those we admire, those we consider timeless in their language and character and scene, those who receive accolades for inventive language and form, have writing lives we imagine in specific ways.
Susan Straight
#19. After work, she wandered around the center of Baltimore, aimlessly, interested in nothing. Was this what the novelists meant by ennui?
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#20. I've known several spies who have wanted to become novelists. And novelists who became spies, of course.
Christopher Koch
#21. Stories in which the destruction of society occurs are explorations of social fears and issues that filmmakers, novelists, playwrights, painters have been examining for a long time.
J.J. Abrams
#22. My grandmother's first husband was a spiritualist medium. What fascinates me about that is the balance between conviction and sincerity and trickery, which is also something that novelists are very familiar with.
Pat Barker
#23. Novelists, it seems to me, are the very last people who should be asked to comment on the news of the day, and sooner or later, when they have been pilloried for their views, most of them recognise this.
Hilary Mantel
#24. I grew up around poets and novelists and my dad wrote poems about everything - from a cat sleeping in a window to a car wreck he passed on the highway. I learned not to censor myself: that was one of things I learned in my apprenticeship, my creative-writing apprenticeship with my dad.
Lucinda Williams
#25. San Francisco has long been a leader in the arts, nurturing generations of painters, sculptors, poets, novelists, playwrights, film-makers, and performing artists and innovators of every kind.
Gavin Newsom
#26. Possibly the Creator did not make the world chiefly for the purpose of providing studies for gifted novelists; but if He had done so, we can scarcely imagine that He could have offered anything much better in the way of material.
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward
#27. What the best novels and novelists do is to offer a different way of seeing.
Aminatta Forna
#28. Novelists embody plural selves all the time. What are characters, after all, if not other selves?
Siri Hustvedt
#29. I have argued about the future of fiction with jaded novelists, far-seeing postmodernists, technologists, television critics. The argument that future generations will not know the pleasures of the novel has been a staple of book reviewing since at least 1960.
Russell Smith
#30. ...though it was too true that life as she is lived has a way of being curiously different from life as described by novelists.
Stella Gibbons
#31. The makers of the short story have rarely been good novelists.
V.S. Pritchett
#33. Maybe someone's who's a different kind of writer [would think otherwise] - someone who'd be just as comfortable writing essays on what their novels are about. Sometimes you feel like certain novelists are like that.
Chang-rae Lee
#34. Novelists can ask - they can ask for anything - but their books are their answers in advance.
Joshua Cohen
#35. She turned to the first page, feeling vaguely prurient, like an eavesdropper or a peeping tom. Novelists spend a lot of time poking their noses into other people's business. Ruth was not unfamiliar with this feeling.
Ruth Ozeki
#36. It's the duty of all novelists, all painters, all musicians, all people who try to make art move: to look for something they feel authentically, without paying attention to styles.
Nathalie Sarraute
#37. Hence one meets in polite society few novelists, or poets, few of all those sublime creatures who speak of the things that are not to be mentioned.
Marcel Proust
#38. In Hollywood, they think they know it all. You, as a writer, are essentially an outsider. Novelists and short-story writers, especially.
Ray Bradbury
#39. Let the novelists fret about consistency - story writers should feel free to jam; to get things right in new, surprising ways by allowing themselves, now and then, to get things wrong.
Walter Kirn
#40. Among novelists I know, no one is more ambitious than I am.
Jonathan Franzen
#41. Novelists invent characters; poets invent themselves.
Marty Rubin
#42. At the meeting you behaves exactly as Marathi novelists of the last century tell is husbands do in sari shops.
Sachin Kundalkar
#43. The more romance novelists that are out there, making romanticized ideas of vampirism for the kids, the more people want to see a real action movie, putting the bad guys where they belong, as the bad guys, and looking for a hero to come along and defend our very souls.
Corey Feldman
#44. Anthony Powell was the most European of 20th-century British novelists.
Tariq Ali
#45. Only a small percentage of novelists, painters, musicians, scientists, anywhere in the world, are talented. But there are many more in Hollywood than one would expect from looking movies.
Hortense Powdermaker
#46. Thriller novelists get asked - berated, sometimes - about whether their work glorifies bad behavior, even, exploits human tragedy for entertainment.
M.J. Rose
#47. I don't know who said that novelists read the novels of others only to figure out how they are written. I believe it's true. We aren't satisfied with the secrets exposed on the surface of the page: we turn the book around to find the seams.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
#48. Money is the necessity that frees us from necessity. Of all novelists in any country, Trollope best understands the role of money. Compared with him even Balzac is a romantic.
W. H. Auden
#49. I came to feel that, in addition to Imre Kertesz, Hungary has produced at least three contemporary novelists who deserve the Nobel: Peter Nadas, Peter Esterhazy and Laszlo Krasznahorkai.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#50. The great novelists are philosophical novelists
that is, the contrary of thesis-writers.
Albert Camus
#51. Novelists don't have answers and ones that do I'm not sure you should trust.
David Mitchell
#52. I put it to you that there are no British poets, there are no British novelists. I have heard myself described as one, but I think really I'm an English novelist; there are Scottish poets and Scottish novelists.
Ian McEwan
#53. I think novelists are in the education business, really, but they're not teaching you times tables, they are teaching you responsiveness and morality and to make nuanced judgments. And really to just make the planet look a bit richer when you go out into the street.
Martin Amis
#54. That is the dream of all novelists-that one of their characters will become 'somebody.'
Jose Saramago
#55. Novelists tend to go off at 70, and I'm in a funk about it, I've got myself into a real paranoid funk about it, how the talent dies before the body.
Martin Amis
#56. What the podcast novelists do isn't all that different from what self-publishers do. We put the books out in different formats, but the goal is the same: build an audience and attract a publisher.
Jeremy Robinson
#57. Most good novelists have been women or homosexuals. The novel is the triumphant evolved creation, one increasingly has to think, of these two groups, who have cooperated more closely in this domain than in any other.
Nicholson Baker
#58. Novelists don't age as quickly as philosophers, who often face professional senility in their late twenties.
Martin Amis
#59. We all now tell stories by cutting from one dramatic scene to the next, whereas Victorian novelists felt free to write long passages of undramatic summary.
Ken Follett
#60. You could say that all novels are spy novels and all novelists are spy masters.
Ian McEwan
#61. What a gift. This page is briefly stained by my tears of gratitude. Novelists don't usually have it so good, do they, when something real happens (something unified, dramatic and pretty saleable), and they just write it down?
Martin Amis
#62. It is true that novelists are shameless and obey no decent law, and they are not to be trusted on any account, but some Mysteries even they must honor.
Catherynne M Valente
#64. Most novelists are narcissistic egomaniacs who would probably fit somewhere on the CEO spectrum.
Joshua Cohen
#65. The novel is just fine: It's novelists who aren't doing so well.
Russell Smith
#66. When I began to read as an adult, I read almost exclusively novelists of a generation back. I did the Russians, then I started getting more up to date. When you become published and become a reviewer, piles of books come along and you are pushed by fashion and what you are commissioned to do.
Hilary Mantel
#67. Novelists don't normally write about what's going on; they write about what's not going on.
Martin Amis
#68. My basic point being that stories are at the heart of what explorers and novelists say about strange regions of the world; they also become the method colonized people use to assert their own identity and the existence of their own history.
Edward W. Said
#69. Writers (my kind of writers: aspiring novelists, ruminative thinkers, people whose brains don't work quick enough to blog or link or tweet, basically old, stubborn blowhards) were through. We were like women's hat makers or buggy-whip manufacturers: Our time was done.
Gillian Flynn
#70. The novel is very much alive, indeed. In Toronto at the Sixth Annual International Festival of Authors (October 1985) I listened to novelists by the dozen.
William Golding
#71. Few novelists can be more scrupulous than Jane Austen as to the phrasing of the thoughts of their characters.
Mary Lascelles
#72. We heads of state really prefer to have some sort of an agenda before we sit down at the high-stakes table, you know. All bad novelists notwithstanding, surprise and improvisation are not the best basis for successful diplomacy!
David Weber
#73. The best and most popular novelists do not, as a rule, have children in their books at all, and this is wise. Parents are about the only people who are interested in children, and they merely in their own ones.
E.M. Delafield
#74. I have always loved short stories. I have been at least as influenced by the short story masters as I have been by novelists.
Daniel Woodrell
#75. Male novelists were granted a 'social tradition' in which to operate, Didion discovered" 'hard drinkers, bad livers, wives, wars, big fish, Africa, Paris, no second acts.
Tracy Daugherty
#76. I do not think men have more talent. There are a great many women in the arts; novelists, painters, sculptors, poets-but the proportion is far lower in the field of song writing.
Dorothy Fields
#77. The most striking fault in work by young or beginning novelists, submitted for criticism, is irrelevance
due either to infatuation or indecision. To direct such an author's attention to the imperative of relevance is certainly the most useful
and possibly the only
help that can be given.
Elizabeth Bowen
#78. I'm inspired by playwrights, novelists, poets: The value of language has been a lifelong passion of mine. I enjoy it. I'm good at it.
Mos Def
#79. I meet kids now who become novelists, poets, write for the theater and movies, who were simply inspired by what they saw during the Spoleto Festival.
Pat Conroy
#80. I love the idea of trying to do the work of old-fashioned novelists of plotting and of really making you curious about what's going to happen next and all that, but also trying to load it up with your weird thoughts and opinions.
Adrian Tomine
#81. I had always thought that the idea of love at first sight was one of those things invented by lady novelists from the South with three names.
John Perry Barlow
#82. Novelists who get shitty about screenwriting invariably can't do it, or they can't hack it in the world of what's really, in truth, very bold and very public enterprise.
William Monahan
#83. I am, when you stop to think of it, a member of a fairly select group: the final handful of American novelists who learned to read and write before they learned to eat a daily helping of video bullshit.
Stephen King
#84. All I want is for someone to understand me before I die. With death staring me in the face, I finally understand the reason novelists write books: before they die they want somebody, somewhere, to understand them.
Natsuo Kirino
#86. Writing for the theatre is so different to writing for anything else. Because what you write is eventually going to be spoken. That's why I think so many really powerful novelists can't write a play - because they don't understand that it's spoken - that it hits the air. They don't get that.
Sam Shepard
#87. I read a lot of graphic novels - some of my favorites graphic novelists or artists are Rebecca Kraatz, Gabrielle Bell, Graham Roumieu, Tom Gauld, and Renee French.
Matthea Harvey
#88. Novelists of a conservative or more purely aesthetic bent hold up better on the surface, but their novels go in and out of fashion according to relevance or irrelevance.
Jane Smiley
#89. Some novelists are luckier than others in the eras of their formative intellectual years, but all Weltanschauungs return, which means that most novelists have at least a chance of a revival.
Jane Smiley
#90. What terrorists gain, novelists lose. The degree to which they influence mass consciousness is the extent of our decline as shapers of sensibility and thought. The danger they represent equals our own failure to be dangerous.'
'And the more clearly we see terror, the less impact we feel from art.
Don DeLillo
#91. I like novelists who can create other interesting worlds.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#92. Not all novelists are power-hungry madman. Some are power-hungry madwomen.
Pseudonymous Bosch
#93. Novelists liked to imagine the interconnectedness of things - as though all the people in the big city were part of some great organism, their lives intertwined. He
Edward Rutherfurd
#94. To what degree are historians chroniclers of the truth and to what degree are they just novelists, frankly?
Peter Morgan
#95. Universities are filled with poets and novelists conducting demure and careful lives in imitation of Eliot and Forster and those others who (through what seems to be have been discretion) made it.
Gore Vidal
#96. Most established novelists are writing books informed by experiences gained in their youth. Middle age is not the best time to be changing smartphones every six months or adopting new technology platforms - because we tend to get slower and less accommodating to change as we age.
Charles Stross
#97. I think there are a lot of really positive aspects to social media for novelists. Even though our work is pretty solitary, through Twitter and Tumblr and Facebook and Instagram and blogging in general, we're better able to connect directly with readers.
Holly Black
#98. I suspect there are two kinds of novelists. Those who have a point of view and have something to say and then write a novel in order to say that thing, and those of us who write the book in order to find out what we think about that thing.
Neil Gaiman
#99. I cannot and do not live in the world of discretion, not as a writer, anyway. I would prefer to, I assure you - it would make life easier. But discretion is, unfortunately, not for novelists.
Philip Roth
#100. I don't have doctrinaire views about how we should relate to Asia. But novelists reflect the world they live in, and that world propels you, to some extent. I'm a creature of the British Empire, and of the period of transition from the Empire.
Christopher Koch
